Justyna Dorsz – Page 29

4 steps for finding a name

I wrote before that the crucial thing is doing the work, not worrying about a name. But you still have to actually find a name. Here I am noting down the process that I use to find names for my stores, websites, companies, and games. There are 4 steps:

1. Write down all the words that come to mind when you think about your project. But don’t make it a list. Write the words loosely on a page. This way you will see connections between them better.

A few words that come to mind when you think about your project.

2. Use a random word generator and get words that you like or that seem connected to the words on your page. I use this one.

3. To get a few more unique words go to — poems! They are the source of words that are not often used in everyday life. Read some poems and write down the words that catch your eye.

4. Look for unique word combinations. If none, repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have more words and then look for connections again.

Wolf, story, home, and other words - look for interesting combinations.

This is how my brother and I found the name for our game studio Manic Hyena and all our games.

“On Writing Well” – Book Notes

I’ve read “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser a few times already, but I’ve reread it these past few days. Now that I am writing a blog, I want to write it well. And the book is full of useful advice.

Here are a few highlights so that I can always keep them on hand:

SIMPLICITY

Strip every sentence to its cleanest components, remove words that don’t serve any purpose, e.g.:

“Are you experiencing any pain?” → “Does it hurt?”
“A personal friend of mine” → “A friend”

AUDIENCE

Write for yourself, write as you talk, write to enjoy yourself, don’t give a damn what the reader might think, don’t be timid or evasive.

USAGE

Be careful with words.

As an example, here are two ways of using the word “too”:

Wrong: “too” is a substitute for “very” (clutters the sentence): “His health is not too good”, “He didn’t feel too much like going shopping.”
Good: when sardonic or humorous use: “He was not too happy when she ignored him.”

LEAD

The most important sentence in any article is the first one. Nudge curiosity, keep the reader inquisitive.

Good lead examples:

“I’ve often wondered what goes into a hot dog. Now I know and I wish I didn’t.”
When in doubt start with a story, like so:
“At some point rather early in the spring of 1947, a Bedouin boy called Muhammed the Wolf was minding some goats near a cliff on the western shore of the Dead Sea.”

Bad lead examples:

Future archeologist: “When some future archaeologist stumbles on the remains of our civilization, what will he make of the jukebox?”
Visitor from Mars: “If a creature from Mars landed on our planet he would be amazed to see hordes of scantily clad earthlings lying on the sand barbecuing their skins.”
The cute event that just happened to happen: “one day not long ago” or “recent Saturday”.
“Have in common”: “What did Joseph Stalin and (…) Akira Kurosawa have in common? They all loved Westerns.”

ENDING

The last sentence of each paragraph should have an extra twist.“Make the reader smile and you have him for at least one more paragraph.”

“The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right.”

“Bring the story to full circle – to strike at the end an echo of a note that was at the beginning.”

People should come away wanting to hear [the writer] again.

VERBS

Better use active and be precise e.g. don’t say “he stepped down”, choose “retired” or “was fired”.

ADVERBS

Most are unnecessary.

ADJECTIVES

Also usually unnecessary. Make the adjectives do the work, don’t use them as decoration, only use when they convey important information.

LITTLE QUALIFIERS

Remove! “A bit”, “a little”, “sort of” “kind of”, “rather”, “quite”, “very”, “too”, “pretty much”, “in a sense”.

PERIOD

Short sentences are better.

EXCLAMATION POINT

Don’t use often.

“Don’t use to notify the reader that you are making a joke “it never occurred to me that the water pistol might be loaded!” Readers are annoyed by your reminder that this was a comical moment. They are also robbed of the pleasure of finding it funny on their own.”

SEMICOLON

Slows pace, use rarely. Usually to add thought at the end of a sentence.

DASH

Use in 2 ways:

Amplify or justify: “We decided to keep going — it was only 100 miles more and we could get there in time for dinner.”
Set apart a thought: “She told me to get in the car—she had been after me all summer to have a haircut—and we drove silently into town.”

MOOD CHANGERS

Use “but” or “yet” at the beginning of a sentence. “However“ is weaker than “but”. Clear confusion with “later” or “now”.

CONTRACTIONS

Use them, style will be warmer: “won’t”, “can’t”.

THAT AND WHICH

Always use “that” unless it makes your meaning ambiguous. If your sentence needs a coma to achieve its precise meaning it probably needs “which.”

“Take the shoes that are in the closet.” – Take the shoes that are in the closet, not the ones under the bed.
“Take the shoes, which are in the closet.” – Only one pair of shoes is under discussion; the “which” usage tells you where they are.”

CONCEPT NOUNS (nouns that express a concept)

Bad writing. Example: “the common reaction is incredulous laughter”, better: “most people just laugh with disbelief”

OVERSTATEMENT

Don’t!

“The room looked as if an atomic bomb had gone off there”

CREDIBILITY

Don’t inflate incidents or make bogus statements

PARAGRAPHS

Keep them short.

Don’t over-explain or put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Don’t use: “surprisingly”, “predictably”, “of course”.

INTERVIEWS

Quote people instead of writing about them.

Bad: “Mr. Smith said that he liked to go downtown once a week and have lunch with some of his old friends.”

Good: “I usually like to go downtown once a week,” Mr. Smith said, “and have lunch with some of my old friends.”

Details! When writing about people details matter.

WRITING ABOUT PLACES

Don’t write about everything, choose something different, that the reader might not know.

Eliminate facts that are known e.g. “beach scattered by rocks“ and “occasionally a seagull flew over”.

“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time” – William Zinsser

How to name your store

When I opened one of my stores a few years ago, I planned to draw little foxes and put them on t-shirts and tote bags. It was supposed to be dark and weird art, the foxes would all be alone in forests and caves, at night. And it would be winter.

I named the store: Fox Shiver.

Here is the first fox that I painted:

After the initial spree of dreary fox designs, I somehow ended up drawing lots of cats. I didn’t make a second separate store for my cat designs — I just published them to my Fox Shiver store.

It would be great to have a thematically consistent store with a fantastic name. But what’s even better is to actually open a store with any name that comes to mind and start publishing and selling.

When you look around, you will notice that plenty of people didn’t overthink their store names either. Go through the stores on any of the websites, and you will see lots of artists who often used a combination of words that they liked or simply their name or nickname.

One of my favorite artists is Nathan W. Pyle. If you don’t know him, here is one of his designs:

Guess what’s the name of Nathan W. Pyle’s store on Threadless.

Here’s another artist that I like: Martina Scott and her store.

You don’t need a perfect name for your store, you need to make art and share it.

We are so tiny

This is a very fun representation of how small our planet is compared to other known objects in space. You can move left and right, and I dare you not to be amazed:

As an artist, I am often asked how I find ideas for what to draw. The answer is that I draw what I love. I very much like reading about space and looking at the night sky, so that’s why I painted this:

Space is one of the two main things that I draw. The other is, of course, cats.

This is a terrible idea

How skilled a designer do you have to be to make a drawing and sell it on a t-shirt?

Have a look at this ridiculous design that I made a few weeks ago:

The idea is key. I thought about a sly cat and drew the simplest version that I could think of:

I used only one color.
The cat doesn’t even have whiskers, but it’s still clear that it’s a cat.
Actually, it’s not even the whole cat, just the head!

Now for the text — this is always the difficult part. I try to choose something that adds a story to the design. Here, the cat hears an idea and likes it very much, even though it’s going to end up in trouble.

7 websites that send me money

In March 2012, I quit my job. I had a three-month notice period, but my boss feared that a mistreated employee might sabotage the company, so he told me not to come to work anymore. Then an assistant accompanied me to the kitchen and watched closely while I retrieved my teacup, and that was that. They still had to pay me my salary, though, which was good because I didn’t have much money saved.

Long months of sitting in my room and drawing ensued. And I will write about that because I know how much we all love stories about grit and perseverance. But let’s skip it for now and let me show you how I’ve been earning money since then. Here is a list of 7 websites. To this day, I sell my art on all of them.

Design By Humans – this is the one that started it for me. A friend had a t-shirt from them and told me that they accept designs from independent artists.
Threadless – this is my favorite one. The nicest people work there. I buy my clothes on Threadless too and even right now I am wearing their hoodie. It was very difficult to be printed there at first. I simply didn’t have the skills for the first 2 years.
TeeFury – the first website that I sent my designs to and the first one that accepted one of them for printing. They look for different designs than Threadless, mostly related to movies or games — that was easier for me to draw back then.
Qwertee – like TeeFury, but it’s Europe-based, which is good because some customers prefer not to pay for shipping from the US.
TeePublic – this one didn’t exist in 2012, it was founded in 2013, and I was one of the first artists there. Also, very nice people, one of the few companies that put artists first.
Redbubble – a huge marketplace. Your art can easily get swamped there with all the other designs. Still, I earn a regular income from them every month.
Woot – they run a derby every week, you can submit designs and compete with others, and then they select a few designs to add to their shop.

This is a tiny sampling of all the websites where you can sell art online, but for me, those were crucial.

This is a story I’ve never told before

This is my, oh I don’t know, the fifth attempt, maybe. My brother read the previous version and hated it.

“Difficult to read,” he said.

Okay.

“No flow,” he said. “You sound like a robot.”

Okay!

“I would delete it and write again.”

Fine.

It was 2012, spring probably, but I will check. I had a dreadfully boring job as a programmer, and it’s difficult to have even a moderately boring coding job because we programmers really enjoy, you know, programming. It’s fun, it’s like puzzles for us, we do it in our free time, we talk about our projects with anyone who wants to know, we read blogs by other programmers where they show how they solved a very obscure pathfinding problem that we don’t need to know about because none of our projects use any pathfinding whatsoever.

And even if some claim that it gets boring after a while — sure, but I was not 2 years out of school, and you are not supposed to be tired of something you barely started. We worked on library systems — as in, systems to manage books in libraries. Those systems were mostly complete, written in Visual Basic some 20 years before, and we worked on a few low-priority features, I think, but I don’t remember much. I had wanted to move out of my parents’ house, so I took the first job offer I got, didn’t even negotiate the salary. Anyway, that spring in 2012 I was walking home, and I was so, so sad, hated the job and didn’t know a way out, there was nothing else I could do, and I was convinced that I hated programming in general not just that particular job, so I didn’t even try to find something new.

So, I was walking home, sad and depressed, and I did something that I am ashamed of to this day. I’ve never told anyone that till now.

I bought a lottery ticket.

If you think it’s nothing bad, and maybe you even buy lottery tickets some days, then that’s fine, but you probably don’t know the odds of winning, and you didn’t study math or computer science or statistics, right? But I did, I had extra math classes in high school, and then I studied computer science and there were a lot of math classes too and in my free time I did math puzzles for fun. My point is: I knew what the odds were. Or maybe I didn’t know the exact probability, but I could calculate it anytime. If someone woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me to calculate the odds of winning a lottery, I could do it. It happened, actually, my dietician asked me this once. Not in the middle of the night, but still, I didn’t expect a math quiz when discussing my low levels of vitamin E. She said something about coincidence and then added: “But if you buy a lottery ticket every day, you are bound to win once in your life, right?”. There wasn’t really a question mark at the end, she said it as if that was common knowledge. It sounded very unlikely, and I took a piece of paper and checked.

In case you wonder, even if you bought lottery tickets every day for 50 years, the probability of winning would be about 0,001. I don’t know about the lottery in your country, but I bet winning is just as unlikely.

Anyway, back to the story: sad, awful job, walking home, lottery ticket. The thing is, someone who knows statistics must be feeling lower than low to buy a lottery ticket. There’s no logic there, no excuse. Feel free to laugh. Don’t laugh at people who don’t know, though, tell them the odds.

After that, the days at work were even worse, and then something amazing happened. No, I didn’t win the lottery, I hope you didn’t think that.

What happened was that a colleague at work had a unique t-shirt, something with a drawing of a bus, and he told me that it’s from Design By Humans and anyone can submit designs there, and they select some for print and pay you. That was new. I have never heard about anything like it, never even heard about any business that paid for a singular piece of work instead of just hiring people and paying them a salary. I took a closer look at his t-shirt and I knew immediately that I couldn’t draw anything like that. But I checked that website and other similar ones and some designs were way better than what I could do, but a few were only somewhat better. I wanted to try to make a design for a t-shirt, it seemed doable.

So, the next few days I analyzed lots of t-shirt websites, read what people wrote about them on Reddit and such, and I made a plan:

Eat cereal and save up half my income.
Draw every day.
After half a year have enough savings to quit my job.
And then I would have another half a year to make designs and try to sell them before running out of money.

Seems solid? I thought so.

Just then, my boss sent me a humiliating email, so I quit.

By the way, I’ve kept that email just in case I ever start blogging, so that’s something for a future post.

The bad thing was that I had hardly any savings. But the most awesome thing was that after those awful months when I hated my life, I finally felt so alive, as maybe never before. I knew I had to draw, and I drew a lot. It was an amazing time, even though none of the designs that I made for the first few weeks got accepted anywhere.

But then one got selected and everything changed.

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